Saturday, August 06, 2005

We have been over wellmed with the posts and emails from friends and family to continue posting the website. After much discussion we have come to the wonderful decision to continue the website and to share with you our adventure into marriage and life.

Since being married a few topics have come up worthy of discussion with our many readers.

Money

Bad Habits

Communication

Delena and I have always prided ourselves as being good communicators. We know were aren't the best in the world, but we have found that we communicate better than most couples we have known (including some married ones). For example: Getting closer to our marriage we discussed goals and ideas about how to manage money and where we were headed so there woul be no surprise to what we wanted to do with our money.

Once we were married we realized we didn't communicate half as well as we thought we had. For instance, on the honeymoon I had suggested that I control the money for the trip since this is how my family did it. But she took that to be that I would always want to control the money. We didn't talk about this for nearly 4 weeks into the marriage when she became upset when asked how we would be paying certain bills. WOW! 4 Weeks of misunderstanding! Eventually we solved the problem and we realized how silly it was. We came up with a solution that hopefully will hold for awhile:

We will each keep our separate accounts but be added as Joints.

She keeps her money and I keep mine.

We will pay all of the group bills out my account and Delena will split the cost on many of those.

All the money that is left in her account is hers to spend.

We have set up a special Join Savings Account. (This is a special at Goldenwest Credit Union where I work, it earns 3.69%) This we are depositing money into each week to save for a home.

We have a debt free plan to be out of our last bits of debt by the end of February next year.

We will watch our finances for the next month and then decide on a budget

So far this plan has been working very well for the past two weeks and we again talked about last night to make sure it was working. I think if we keep talking and not holding things back just thinking it will go away or that we have to settle we will do fine.

Also we both have a few bad habits, I always leave clothes in the living room or on the floor, she always leaves dishes in the sink, etc. Again we didn't communicate about it and found ourselves frustrated. We finally did and something we just needed to talk about other things we found could be helped and changed.

I love marriage but it is constant work, I don't how people make it who don't communicate!